One week to go...

I’m currently nearing the end of the first week of rehearsals for Curtain Up at the Coliseum which opens on Friday 26 October for two nights only.

I started working on the show a couple of months ago once we’d said goodbye to the cast of Star-Cross’d. I then sat down and started drafting the running order for the evening, deciding what productions to include and who should be a part of this special event.

It wasn’t a simple task as the Coliseum has staged hundreds of plays over the years. I wanted to include not only the most popular productions we have staged but also a variety of different theatre styles; musical, drama, comedy. I also wanted work around a (fairly loose) theme of the Coliseum ‘through the ages’ so I have included some classic productions from the past as well as extracts from more recent plays.

Next I needed to think about who would be in the ensemble cast. This means they won’t be playing just one character for the evening; instead they’ll be part of various scenes and numbers from different productions throughout the evening (so that’s an awful lot of lines and cues for them to remember!).

If you haven’t already heard, the cast includes Kieran Buckeridge (Travels with my Aunt, Dick Barton, Wind in the Willows), Adam Barlow (Star-Cross’d, Kes, The Road to Nab End), Gemma Wardle (Up on the Roof, Union Street, Sweet Charity), Sue Devaney (Sleeping Beauty, Good Golly Miss Molly), Nicola Bolton (Stepping Out, Wizard of Oz), Catherine Kinsella (The Memory of Water, Stepping Out) and the inimitable Kenneth Alan Taylor (I could list all the plays he’s been in but it’s nearly 300!).

The ensemble will be joined by a host of guest appearances including Coronation Street stars Julie Hesmondhalgh (Hayley Cropper), Lisa George (Beth Tinker) and Shobna Gulati (Sunita Alahan).

This week we’ve been running through the various sections of the show which includes a good helping of musical numbers (many of which you’ll know and I’ll bet they’ll be some singing along on the night). Howard Gray - who worked on Private Lives, Up on the Roof and Satin ‘n’ Steel - will be heading up a three piece band to accompany the cast (and they’ll be taking to the stage a few times during the night too).

The cast and band (and guest stars) have all been fantastic and it’s humbling to see how excited they are to be part of this special event that will go down in the Coliseum’s history. And I’m pretty excited too. It will be fantastic to see the auditorium with people in it again, especially an audience full of such support for the theatre.

See you at the theatre.

Kevin Shaw
Artisitc Director